


Something Amazing Happened

by LtTanyaBoone



Category: I'm Yours (2011)
Genre: F/M, Gen, Recreational Drug Use
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-08
Updated: 2012-11-08
Packaged: 2017-11-18 07:34:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,933
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/558469
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LtTanyaBoone/pseuds/LtTanyaBoone
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Running away is easy. Deciding to stay is hard.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Something Amazing Happened

**Fandom:** I'm Yours (2011)  
 **Disclaimers:** _I'm Yours_ , the rights to the movie and its characters do not belong to me. No money was made by this.  
 **Pairing:** Marie/Robert

 **Warning:** (past) drug use

* * *

In the crazy, lust filled moments just before Robert comes he breathes a name into her ear and she freezes as he spills into her. Marie pushes him off and flees to the bathroom, locking the door behind her.

The spray of the shower is ice cold as she stands under it, stifling a yelp with her hand before she slides to the floor. It feels like a shower of needles pricking at her skin as she sits there, hoping the beating of water covers the sound of her crying.

When she climbs into bed an hour later and he pulls her close she lets him.

“What’s going on?”

“Nothing.” Marie breathes, shaking her head and allowing him to kiss her. She even tries a smile before she turns around and presses her eyes shut when she turns her face into the pillow.

As Robert’s snoring starts filling the room that used to be her bedroom, she whispers into the dark.

“My name is Marie.”

* * *

“Ah, I made breakfast.” she says, gesturing towards the plate of pancakes sitting on the counter as Natalie pounds into the kitchen, grabbing an apple. The girl freezes, eyeing the plate suspiciously, casting a glance at her grandmother.

“What?” Marie asks, looking back and forth between the two. “I can cook.”

“We know.” her mother says, raising her hands in a gesture of surrender. She stares at the older woman before grabbing the plate impulsively, throwing the food away and setting the plate down in the sink with a loud clatter.

“Have a nice day at school.” she says to her daughter, pressing a kiss to Natalie’s temple as she leaves the kitchen and the house, throwing the door closed behind her with a bang.

* * *

Deep down, she’s always been afraid of not being good enough. She tried so hard as a child, as a teenager, but nothing she ever did seemed to be enough to have her father compliment her.

The first time she took drugs was at a party she shouldn’t have been at. But there had been a math test and she had failed it and no idea of how to explain that to her parents, and then Emma had invited her and Marie had wanted to forget about school and her parents for a little while. The party didn’t do the trick, but the tiny pill Emma’s boyfriend gave her in challenge did. For the first time in months, she didn’t feel chained down by too many responsibilities. She felt… free. And nothing else mattered aside from making that feeling last.

* * *

Robert finds her ten minutes to midnight, in the place she fled to when her parents first kicked her out. The owners have changed, but the menu hasn’t. The coffee is still luke warm and still leaves a taste of burnt food in her mouth and the powdered sugar from the donuts still clings to her fingers.

He doesn’t say anything, just steals a piece of donut from her plate and starts chewing, reaching for her cup of coffee with one hand and entwines the fingers of the other with hers.

He doesn’t let go even when she starts crying and he walks around the table to sit next to her and hold her.

* * *

Robert has to go back to the US to tie up loose ends at his old position. The minute he is out of the door, back are the rules. For a second, Daphne wants to laugh in her parents’ faces because they think that they can impose a curfew on an adult, but Marie remembers the girl still sleeping with a teddy bear Robert gave her for Christmas so she doesn’t.

* * *

They don’t fight, not really. Sometimes they raise their voices and slam doors and she snaps at him in French, but they never really argue.

And then Natalie is chanting in her ear while she tries filling out a form for her school to change her daughter’s address and guardian and everything. Something about chewing gum and Daphne wants her to just shut up so she can hear herself think for a minute, so she tells her to just grab some out of her bag.

Marie realizes something is wrong when Natalie doesn’t come bounding back like a boomerang. She gets up and walks into the hallway of their new apartment to find the girl holding her bag in one hand and a little Ziploc in the other, six white pills still in it. Before Marie can say anything, the door opens and this is how Robert finds them. The fight that follows has their ears ringing for hours and even has one of the neighbors come knocking.

* * *

The next day, Natalie doesn’t come home after school and they look for her everywhere before her mother calls. The girl refuses to come back home with them and Marie has no idea what to say to her. There is so much she couldn’t possibly understand, so much that Marie hopes her daughter will never be able to understand. Because when she does, she knows that she screwed up just as badly as her own parents.

Strangely enough, it’s Daphne who manages to get her back. She takes the girl to the bathroom and throws her last stash into the toilet before flushing until the pills have disappeared down the drain.

It doesn’t matter that she hasn’t been high for four months now, that she’s proven to herself that she doesn’t need drugs to feel or to escape. The moment her safety net disappears has her terrified like never before in her life.

* * *

The future of the world rests on the backs of a flock of brainless birds, and sometimes, Marie wishes she could be one, too. She’s never sure if it would be a blessing or a curse if it were true.

* * *

The other parents aren’t fans of her. It doesn’t take her long to realize that. Her mother assures her she never said anything, so they must have drawn her own conclusions what a nineteen year old could have possibly done to not raise her own child and have no contact with her for years before she shows up again to reclaim that spot in Natalie’s life.

When Natalie’s birthday comes around and her daughter grows quieter and quieter, Marie isn’t sure what to do. Daphne, however, is brewing silently, planning her sneak attack. The day when her daughter tells her that no one will come to her party is when she launches it.

As a teenager, Marie hated those damn phone chain lists that handed out the number of every family in the class to the parents. Her mother called around after her when she didn’t come home often, going through the list from top to bottom and back to the top again.

Now Daphne grabs it from the fridge and gets the first from the stack of invitations her daughter handed out. She finds the name on the list and starts dialing. Eleven phone calls and four hours later, she has a guest list of eight and hangs up with a satisfied smile on her face. She doesn’t have issues with getting punished for her own mistakes, but she draws the line at strangers punishing her daughter for the stupid things the girl’s mother used to do.

That Friday, when a group of screaming girls races through the house of her parents, Marie wishes for a drink as she rests her forehead against the door of the kitchen cupboard.

“Can we have dinner now?” Natalie’s voice pulls her from the list of expletives she’s going through in her head. When she turns around, she’s faced with her grinning daughter, wearing a smile so wide it threatens to split her face in two.

“Half an hour, okay?” she says, reaching out to tousle the girl’s hair and her daughter runs off again, leaving Marie to smile to herself.

* * *

Her and Robert do get married. It takes two years, half of which he spends driving back and forth between North Bay and New York before he manages to find a job in the area.

Marie starts working at the convenience store, mostly because she wants to have something to do. The children that come in like her enough, because while she has an eye for catching them just when they are sneaking snickers bars into the pockets of their jackets, she never busts them or calls the cops. She has them had back the sweets and watches them leave and most of them are smart enough to never try again on her watch.

Natalie’s friend Emma has an older brother that, strangely enough, is around Marie’s age. He compliments her at work and tells her she should be a model. Daphne thinks he’s rather attractive and that Robert has been gone for far too long, but just as she’s seriously contemplating taking him up on his offer, her cell phone chimes with a text from her husband and Marie finds herself grinning at his ineptitude at sexting.

* * *

Marie crosses her arms and shifts on her feet, bouncing a little in the cold. It’s the first snow of the year and Natalie and Robert are building a snowfamily in her parents’ backyard. For someone who complains a lot about the cold, her husband is way too eager to get knee deep into the freshly fallen snow.

When he sees her standing on the porch, Robert abandons his work and comes jogging over to her, clambering up the steps.

“You will have to sweep it.” she reminds him, nodding at the snow he spreads on the wood when he jumps from one foot to the other before he wraps his arms around her waist and kisses her.

“Sure.” he shrugs, grinning at her before he turns to watch Natalie provide the tall snowman with arms. Robert keeps his arm around her and presses a soft kiss to her temple that makes Marie sigh with happiness.

Ten years ago, the quiet up here made her want to scream, but now it calms her. For the first time since she can remember, there is nothing in her life she would like to run from. She has a husband and a daughter, a family, and while they are far from perfect and still struggling with each other sometimes, they somehow manage to make it work.

In the drawer of the desk sitting in Robert’s study at their new house are the signed adoption papers. Natalie’s birthday is in two weeks, they will be her present. It shocked her when the girl asked if she could call him Dad even though he wasn’t. She hadn’t been saying Mama to her for more than three weeks at that point and kept switching back and forth between that and her name. Adopting Natalie had felt like the next logical step when they got married. His promise to Natalie that he wasn’t going to disappear, even if this thing between him and her mother wasn’t going to work out.

“I’ve been thinking.” she announces, leaning into Robert’s side.

“Careful.” he jokes and she hits him lightly across the chest, the thick winter jacket softening the blow. She looks up at him and can’t help but smile when she sees the happiness in his eyes and the curiosity.

“Perhaps we should get a puppy.”

_fin._


End file.
